Biography

Somali Chaterji is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University. She works in the areas of data science and engineering for digital agriculture and genomics and in building cyberinfrastructures for these domains. She is a part of the WHIN (Wabash Heartland Innovation Network) leadership team working to bring IoT to advance agriculture. Data is power! She believes in leveraging the power of big data by drawing actionable insights from diverse agricultural sensing data to make agricultural practices high-throughput and sustainable. As a second thrust of her work, Prof. Chaterji is extracting insights from epigenomic data for predictive and personalized healthcare, one in which health and vitality is the focus. To accomplish her goals, Prof. Chaterji develops algorithms and statistical models for precision medicine, and more recently, in digital agriculture with an eye toward sustainability. She got her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Purdue University, winning the Chorafas International Award (2010), College of Engineering Best Dissertation Award (2010), and the Future Faculty Fellowship Award (2009). She did her Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, where her work was supported by an American Heart Association (AHA) award. She has won the best paper award at the ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (BCB) conference in 2015. Dr. Chaterji is also a lab-to-bedside commercialization enthusiast and is a scientific advisor to the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin since 2014. Dr. Chaterji won Purdue’s Seed-for-Success Award in 2016 for winning a research grant of more than $1M (NIH R01).